Markets

by Sadie Williamson

on 05.09.18

More than eight years have passed since the introduction of Bitcoin and the promise of “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” As of today, there are around 1,500 cryptocurrencies — a testament to the power people see in blockchain-based solutions. Many of the hundreds of cryptocurrencies out ...

by Danny Bradbury

on 05.03.18

Financial firms are becoming more positive about the prospect of blockchain-based cryptocurrency trading, with one in five planning to test the waters in the next year, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters as reported by Business Insider. The data and news agency asked 400 of its clients, ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 05.03.18

Spanish bank BBVA has become the first global bank to issue a loan using distributed ledger technology (DLT), Financial Times reported recently. Founded in 1857, BBVA is one of Spain’s leading banks and a major global financial services group. BBVA is also the biggest financial institution in ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 05.02.18

The blockchain-oriented fintech integrator IntellectEU is launching its Catalyst platform to connect business applications, financial market infrastructures and blockchain networks. According to IntellectEU, Catalyst is the first such platform to integrate with multiple blockchain networks. ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 04.19.18

Nuggets, a distributed ledger technology (DLT) startup focused on payment and identity systems, has been endorsed by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Trade, the Mayor of London and the City of London and invited on two major trade visits to China. “As a blockchain start-up, ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 03.01.18

New research from the global fund transaction network operator Calastone forecasts that more than $2.6 billion worth of potential cost savings for the global mutual funds market could be achieved by moving to a blockchain-enabled distributed market infrastructure. The Calastone press release ...

by Peter Chawaga

on 02.23.18

BTC Media, the owner of Distributed.com, as well as a conference series and other media properties, announced the return of its Distributed: Markets event, a presentation of blockchain use cases and advocacy designed for executives in the financial industry and the digital disruptors who are ...

by Danny Bradbury

on 02.07.18

The Toronto Stock Exchange Venture Exchange (TSXV), once a haven for Canada’s many natural resource mining companies, is now becoming a sanctuary for miners of a different kind. The TSXV is a venture capital exchange commonly used by mining exploration outfits to raise funds. Now, cryptocurrency ...

by Danny Bradbury

on 01.31.18

Financial services companies are beating traditional technology firms in the race to file blockchain-related patents, according to a recent analysis. Envision IP, a boutique law firm specializing in patent valuation, analyzed patent filings in the distributed ledger space in January of 2018 and ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 12.28.17

Among the items highlighted in accounting and professional services giant Deloitte’s “Tech Trends 2018” report were new business opportunities and creative ways of solving problems with emerging technologies, including machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), digital reality and, of ...

by Michael Scott

on 12.20.17

In a move scrutinized by many in the technology industry and the financial sector, the French government recently announced that it will clear the way for unlisted securities to be traded utilizing blockchain-based digital ledgers. This new development is thought to be aimed at improving ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 11.20.17

On October 20, 2017, Mastercard announced that developers would be able to access its blockchain technology platform via its Mastercard blockchain API published on Mastercard Developers. The new service was launched during the Money20/20 Hackathon in Las Vegas after testing and validation had ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 10.09.17

Last month, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told an investor conference in New York that Bitcoin “won’t end well,” because “it’s a fraud” and “worse than tulip bulbs,” Bloomberg reported. Dimon said he would fire any employee trading bitcoin for being “stupid.” JPMorgan being one of the world’s ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 09.21.17

One of distributed ledger technology’s most promising attributes, the power to enable smart contracts, has applications that reach far and wide. As blockchain technology becomes more widely adopted, many of these applications are coming to fruition.A 2016 Forbes story titled “Smart Contracts May ...

by Dustin Byington

on 09.15.17

This year media has brought extensive attention to the rise of cryptocurrencies. At the time of this writing there are more than 900 cryptocurrencies available online with a market cap up nearly 800 percent this year alone. On August 11, the value of all cryptocurrencies reached an all-time high ...

by Martin Bartlam and Mark Radcliffe, DLA Piper

on 09.14.17

Blockchain technology is a nascent innovation that is providing evolving applications in finance every day. Several regulators have already signaled their intention to examine the use of blockchains. While potentially attractive to regulators due to increased transaction security and reduced ...

by Christopher Tozzi

on 08.17.17

Blockchain-based cryptocurrency platforms like Bitcoin and Ethereum have a major problem to solve if they are going to conquer the world of finance: scaling.In this context, scaling refers to the ability to process more transactions in a timely fashion. Scaling is important because it’s the only ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 08.10.17

As Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) continue to serve as go-to fundraisers for companies in the blockchain and cryptocurrency spaces, the regulations governing them become increasingly imperative.“The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an investigative report today cautioning ...

by Christopher Tozzi

on 07.27.17

A major German automaker and a group of banks have become the latest large corporations to embrace blockchains on a large scale, to the tune of 100 million euros. A loan worth $114 million, which was announced last month, was issued via blockchain technology to Daimler AG, a German automaker, by ...

by Michael Scott

on 07.20.17

When it comes to international commerce and equities, Delaware, the second-smallest state in the U.S., has big intentions. The state already has a stellar reputation as one of the best places to establish a corporate entity in America, boasting two-thirds of all U.S.-listed companies and 85 ...

by Max Bronstein

on 07.19.17

In a world where growth moves faster than payments, many small businesses struggle to pay off their urgent capital expenditures. Companies of all sizes have short-term costs that are integral to their operations: Office rent, short-term investments and employee salaries are all generally paid on ...

by Michael Scott

on 07.13.17

Corporate entities have long been employed by enterprises seeking to limit their liability, protect their assets and minimize tax burdens. These legal structures have evolved over time, emerging as one of the most common vehicles for conducting business domestically and worldwide. Today, with ...

by Pete Harris

on 07.06.17

In the world of financial markets, there’s an old saying (from 1984) attributed to former Citicorp CEO and chairman Walter Wriston: “Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.” More than 30 years later, that sentiment has surely become a truism, especially in an age ...

by Christopher Tozzi

on 06.15.17

Compared to Western nations, many areas of Africa lack extensive infrastructure, entrenched financial institutions, a high degree of political stability and/or large pools of capital. In most traditional senses, these challenges constrain opportunities for growth on the continent.Yet in many ...

by Bradley Fink

on 06.08.17

In March, several major companies joined together and formed the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), with a plan to create software standards for Ethereum in business use cases. The 30 founding members included Microsoft, Intel, JP Morgan, Accenture and Thompson Reuters.The goal was to establish ...

by Pete Harris

on 06.01.17

Part one of this article looked at blockchain pilot deployment challenges and suggested that having DevOps skills on the implementation team could help. This article aims to highlight complex data integration issues as another aspect of roll out that will be critical in moving blockchains from ...

by Alex Lielacher

on 05.25.17

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that it plans to go live with its blockchain-powered credit default swaps (CDS) reporting platform in the first quarter of 2018.The New York-based DTCC is the post-trade services provider for the U.S. market and provides settlement and ...

by Bradley Fink

on 05.23.17

An intriguing prospect for blockchain technology is the power to ensure transparency in voting, though the mainstream political system is unlikely to embrace this potential in the near future.It’s more likely that this application will have to be established first in traditional finance, as ...

by Bradley Fink

on 05.11.17

Because of its scarcity, portability, divisibility and current valuation, many people are calling bitcoin the modern “digital gold.” And like gold, bitcoin seems to be establishing itself as a popular store of value.But now CME Group, one of the world’s largest providers of gold futures ...

by Pete Harris

on 05.04.17

At a conference in Houston, TX, last month, R3’s Tim Grant presented his version of a “blockchain adoption timeline.” It seemed to reflect a broader industry view that while 2014 was “The Year of Enlightenment” and 2015 “The Year of the Hype,” 2017 will be the year that blockchain projects move ...

by Bradley Fink

on 04.27.17

Word in China is out about blockchain technology, as the government made clear in an Informatization Strategy published in December of 2016. The strategy states, “The internet, cloud computing, large data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain … will drive the evolution of ...

by Pete Harris

on 04.26.17

This year is set to be a big one for companies looking to implement their first live pilots of applications built on blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Drawing on the experience of in-house lab experiments and proof-of-concept (PoC) tests, these early adopters will be looking to ...

by Pete Harris

on 04.20.17

As was noted in part one of this analysis, 2017 will see companies looking to implement their first live pilots of applications built on blockchain and distributed ledger technology.A big difference between a proof-of-concept and a pilot is that in the latter deployment scenario, the blockchain ...

by Alex Lielacher

on 04.13.17

U.S. asset management giant Fidelity Investments Inc. is the first financial institution to join The Initiative for CryptoCurrencies & Contracts (IC3), a blockchain technology development group composed of leading academic institutions and tech companies.The IC3 group is based at the Jacobs ...

by Addison Cameron-Huff

on 03.30.17

Tokenization is the process of converting rights to an asset into a digital token on a blockchain. There is great interest by financial intermediaries and technologists around the world in figuring out how to move real-world assets onto blockchains to gain the advantages of Bitcoin while keeping ...

by Pete Harris

on 03.02.17

With this week’s launch of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), companies looking to implement blockchain technology for production business applications got another open-source option to explore, as an alternative to the Fabric and Corda platforms in development under the stewardship of the ...

by Peter Chawaga

on 02.22.17

Blythe Masters solidified her Wall Street reputation as a top-level executive at J.P.Morgan, which she left in 2014 after a career spanning 27 years. Since then, she has bridged the gap from financial institutions to fintech startups by becoming CEO of Digital Asset, a leader in the use of ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 02.09.17

Two major players in the global insurance industry, Generali Group and Reinsurance Group of America (RGA), have announced that they are joining the Blockchain Insurance Industry Initiative B3i to further explore the potential use of distributed ledger technology for the insurance and health ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 02.02.17

The Hyperledger Project, a collaborative cross-industry effort led by The Linux Foundation to create an enterprise-grade, open-source distributed ledger technology, announced that American Express has joined the project as a Premier Member. The global financial services giant joins more than 100 ...

by Pete Harris

on 01.19.17

The recent news that the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is planning to rebuild a key element of its trade processing infrastructure using distributed ledger technology supports the notion that proof-of-concept (PoC) projects are now transforming into real-life pilots. It also ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 01.12.17

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that it has selected IBM, in partnership with Axoni and R3, to provide a distributed ledger technology framework for post-trade derivatives processing, including credit default swaps. The final goal of the project is to develop a ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 12.29.16

In June Bitcoin Magazine reported that R3, the financial innovation consortium that includes many of the world’s leading banks, commissioned Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin to write a report on Ethereum design, upcoming technical developments and applications in private systems. R3 published ...

by Pete Harris

on 12.15.16

R3 CEV – the fintech company that leads the R3 financial services distributed ledger consortium – has been in the news a lot in recent weeks, though not always with the most positive spin. The negative news broke last month that a number of the banks that joined as early members of the ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 11.17.16

This week, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) launched Vulcan Digital Asset Services, a new blockchain-based platform designed for all sorts of digital transactions. The platform has an emphasis on identity verification and compliance services that, PwC hopes, should make it attractive to banks and ...

by Pete Harris

on 11.03.16

R3 CEV, a leading financial services consortium, has announced its intention to open source its Corda distributed ledger technology via the Hyperledger Project—in which it is a major member—despite its plans to patent Corda.According to a spokesperson for R3, the patent application and open ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 10.27.16

On October 21, 2016, Visa announced a new partnership with blockchain enterprise company Chain that will develop “a simple, fast and secure way to process B2B payments globally.” Dubbed Visa B2B Connect, the system will offer participating pilot financial institutions a consistent process for ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 10.20.16

Symbiont announced the release of a software development kit for Assembly, the permissioned distributed ledger component of Symbiont's Smart Securities Platform—a bespoke blockchain independent of Bitcoin and Ethereum. According to the company, Assembly is a distributed ledger designed for use ...

by Giulio Prisco

on 10.13.16

The Hyperledger Project, a collaborative cross-industry effort to advance blockchain technology led by The Linux Foundation, continues to announce new organizations joining the project to help create an open standard for distributed ledgers for a new generation of transactional applications. The ...

by Pete Harris

on 09.22.16

The transition from “talking” about blockchains to “walking” with them is increasingly cited as a required next step for 2017. To that end, financial services IT specialist Synechron has released a set of “accelerators” that will enable firms to deliver early blockchain-based apps faster, more ...